In addition to Chiang, Japan also faced the twentieth century’s greatest guerrilla leader, the wily Mao Tse-tung, who himself controlled part of China, commanded large forces, and enjoyed the support of the peasants.
With Chiang’s forces, the Japanese faced a traditional army of uniformed soldiers carrying out traditional operations. But Japanese army strategists had no appreciation for the strength of Mao’s brilliant guerrilla tactics. Whereas the Japanese army pursued a ruthless policy of slaughter known as the “Three Alls” (“Kill All, Loot All, Burn All”), Mao insisted on decorous “rules” when dealing with the Chinese peasants:
All actions are subject to command.
Do not steal from the people.
Be neither selfish nor unjust.
Replace the door when you leave the house.
Roll up the bedding on which you have slept.
Be courteous.
Be honest in your transactions.
Return what you borrow.
Replace what you break.
Do not bathe in the presence of women.
Do not without authority search those you arrest.
The Spirit Warriors soon became frustrated with the “unfair” tactics of the guerrillas in their midst. “Massacres of civilians were routine,” one soldier later recalled. “They cooperated with the enemy, sheltered them in their houses, gave them information. We viewed them as the enemy. During combat, all villagers went into hiding. We pilfered anything useful from their houses or, in winter, burned them for firewood. If anyone was found wandering about, we captured and killed them. Spies! This was war.”
Countries avoid a declaration of war so they may claim “the laws and customs of war did not apply and need not be observed.” Japan never declared war on China. Instead, the fighting was euphemized as an “incident.” Chinese troops were not “soldiers,” but “bandits.” One of the customs of war Japan was able to flout in this “incident” against “bandits” was acknowledgment that captured Chinese soldiers were prisoners of war. A 1933 army infantry textbook assured IJA officers that when they took prisoners, “if you kill them there will be no repercussions.” In a 1937 directive, the army vice chief stated: “In the present situation, in order to wage total war in China, the empire will neither apply, nor act in accordance with, all the concrete articles of the Treaty Concerning the Laws and Customs of Land Warfare and Other Treaties Concerning the Laws and Regulations of Belligerency.” The same directive ordered “staff officers in China to stop using the term ‘prisoner of war.’” As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Herb Bix pointed out, Hirohito himself “supported the policy of withholding a declaration of war against China and ratified and personally endorsed the decision to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war.” Thus Chinese soldiers taken in battle were “denied the status of prisoners of war upon the same pretext and many of them were massacred, tortured, or drafted into Japanese labor camps.”
When young Shozo Tominaga arrived in China as a new Japanese army lieutenant, he was introduced to the twenty soldiers he was to lead. He was shocked by what he saw.
Tominaga was a gentle and studious boy. He had made his parents proud by graduating from prestigious Tokyo Imperial University—in Japan the equivalent of Harvard and Oxford rolled into one. Tominaga had planned for a peaceful civilian career but was drafted and soon found himself in China as a lieutenant in the emperor’s army. Fresh out of officers’ school, he had never seen battle. Decades later, he remembered what made his skin crawl that day.
“I’ll never forget meeting them,” Tominaga recalled. “When I looked at the men of my platoon I was stunned—they had evil eyes. They weren’t human eyes, but the eyes of leopards or tigers. They’d experienced many battles and I was completely green. I’d seen nothing. How could I give these guys orders, or even look into those faces? I lost all my confidence. Among the men were new conscripts, two-year men, and three-year men. The longer the men had been at the front, the more evil their eyes appeared.”
For five days, Tominaga and twenty-one other newly minted officers toured past battlefields where they could examine “the physical features, trying to apply our book knowledge to geography real war had touched.” Then it was time to acquire a little fighting spirit, Japanese army style.
A dehumanized enemy is easy to kill, and Japanese soldiers were instructed that they were not dealing with humans at all but kichiku, or “devils.” The idea of treating the Chinese as beasts was not informal scuttlebutt but a command from officers whose directives had to be considered orders of the emperor. Tominaga recalled:
The next-to-last day of the exercise, Second Lieutenant Tanaka took us to the detention center. Pointing at the people in a room, all Chinese, he announced, “These are the raw materials for your trial of courage.” We were astonished at how thin and emaciated they looked. Tanaka told us, “They haven’t been fed for several days, and so they’ll be ready for their part in tomorrow’s plan.” He said that it was to be a test to see if we were qualified to be platoon leaders. He said we wouldn’t be qualified if we couldn’t chop off a head.
On the final day, we were taken out to the site of our trial. Twenty-four prisoners were squatting there with their hands tied behind their backs. They were blindfolded. A big hole had been dug—ten meters long, two meters wide, and more than three meters deep. The regimental commander, the battalion commanders, and the company commanders all took the seats arranged for them. Second Lieutenant Tanaka bowed to the regimental commander and reported, “We shall now begin.” He ordered a soldier on fatigue duty to haul one of the prisoners to the edge of the pit; the prisoner was kicked when he resisted. The soldier finally dragged him over and forced him to his knees. Tanaka turned toward us and looked into each of our faces in turn. “Heads should be cut off like this,” he said, unsheathing his army sword. He scooped water from a bucket with a dipper, and then poured it over both sides of the blade. Swishing off the water, he raised his sword in a long arc. Standing behind the prisoner, Tanaka steadied himself, legs spread apart, and cut off the man’s head with a shout, “Yo!” The head flew more than a meter away. Blood spurted up in two fountains from the body and sprayed into the hole.
The scene was so appalling that I felt I couldn’t breathe. All the candidate officers stiffened. Second Lieutenant Tanaka designated the person on the right end of our line to go next. I was fourth. When my turn came, the only thought I had was “Don’t do anything unseemly!” I didn’t want to disgrace myself. I bowed to the regimental commander and stepped forward. Contrary to my expectations, my feet firmly met the ground. One thin, worn-out prisoner was at the edge of the pit, blindfolded. I unsheathed my sword, a gift from my brother-in-law, wet it down as the lieutenant had demonstrated, and stood behind the man. The prisoner didn’t move. He kept his head lowered. Perhaps he was resigned to his fate. I was tense, thinking I couldn’t afford to fail. I took a deep breath and recovered my composure. I steadied myself, holding the sword at a point above my right shoulder, and swung down. The head flew away and the body tumbled down, spouting blood. The air reeked from all that blood. I washed blood off the blade, then wiped it with the paper provided. Fat stuck to it and wouldn’t come off.
At that moment, I felt something change inside me. I don’t know how to put it, but I gained strength somewhere in my gut. Until that day I had been overwhelmed by the sharp eyes of my men when I called the roll each night. That night I realized I was not self-conscious at all in front of them. I didn’t even find their eyes evil anymore. I felt I was looking down on them. Later, when the National Defense Women’s Association welcomed us in Manchuria, they mentioned to me that they had never seen men with such evil eyes. I no longer even noticed.
Soon Lieutenant Tominaga was imparting his newly acquired Japanese spirit to recently arrived conscripts. Officers like him wore swords, but the ordinary soldiers used bayonets to prove they were worthy to perform their “divine mission” in China
.
“As the last stage of their training, we made them bayonet a living human,” Tominaga said. “When I was a company commander, this was used as a finishing touch to training for the men and a trial of courage for the officers. Prisoners were blindfolded and tied to poles. The soldiers dashed forward to bayonet their target at the shout of ‘Charge!’ Some stopped on their way. We kicked them and made them do it. After that, a man could do anything easily.”
Years later, Masato Kawana remembered his test of courage with live Chinese prisoners: “The prisoners were blindfolded and tied to the post. A circle was drawn in red chalk around the area of the heart on their grimy clothes. As the bayonet training began, the instructor bellowed out, ‘Ready? The red circle is where the heart is. That’s the one place you’re prohibited to stab. Understand?’ I thought that the instructor had marked the area to make it easier for the new recruits to stab the heart. But that was my misunderstanding. It was to make the prisoners last as long as possible.”
“We made them like this,” Tominaga concluded. “Good sons, good daddies, good elder brothers at home were brought to the front to kill each other. Human beings turned into murdering demons. Everyone became a demon within three months. Men were able to fight courageously only when their human characteristics were suppressed. So we believed. It was a natural extension of our training back in Japan. This was the Emperor’s Army.”
Armies travel on their stomachs. Military professionals realize that the care and feeding of the troops is an essential part of warfare. Securing and moving vast stores of foodstuff requires enormous resources. The Spirit Warriors, with their “three-month war” mentality, never bothered mobilizing these resources. So they solved their supply problem with a euphemism—“local supply.”
Newspaper reporter Tatsuzo Asai remembers with disgust the staff officers who “hardly ever went out to the front themselves,” who “just sat with their legs apart, looking tough, engaging in desktop strategizing in Tokyo.” “They’d land thousands of men somewhere,” Asai said, “but there’d be no supplies coming from the rear. ‘Use local supply,’ they’d order them. The local people would be growing barely enough to feed themselves, and here would come thousands of Japanese to take away what the natives had.”
“Food had to be supplied locally,” Enomoto-san remembered. “We were entitled to take what we needed. We could help ourselves. When we went into a village, the first thing we’d do is to look for food.”
“When we went searching for food, we found women hiding,” said soldier Shiro Azuma. “We thought, ‘Oh, they look tasty.’ So we raped them. But every single time a woman was raped, the soldiers would kill her. Any villagers who had not run off by nightfall would be murdered—to ensure no one could report where the invaders slept.” Tominaga remembered, “Most of us thought then that murdering, raping, and setting fire to villages were unavoidable acts in war, nothing particularly wrong.” After all their indoctrination, this was not surprising.
One hundred thousand Americans would die in the Pacific war, while Japan would suffer about 2.5 million military and civilian casualties fighting the U.S. and China. No one will ever know for sure, but estimates are that nearly 30 million Chinese died in the Rape of China. They died in military operations, for being guerrillas, for possessing some food, for being in the way, for being a girl, or just because a bored Japanese soldier wanted to have some fun. Entertainment included rape, dousing people with gasoline and lighting a match, forcing sons to rape mothers, shoving sticks of dynamite up girls’ vaginas to blow them up, cutting fetuses out of pregnant wombs, and chopping off countless heads.
“I went into a village and saw a girl about fourteen or fifteen years old,” Enomoto-san told me years later. “I approached her, and her father appeared. I wanted to rape her. I thought, Well, if he were her father he probably wouldn’t be very happy if I was raping his daughter, so I shot him. I killed him. She started crying and she was shaking. She knew what was going to happen to her. I just raped her and then I killed her. It just took one thrust of the bayonet and then she fell over.”
When I asked the aged Enomoto-san how he felt about rape back then, he answered, “I was young so it felt all right. Also I felt some satisfaction as a soldier.” When I asked him if he remembered the expression on the girl’s face as he raped her, Enomoto-san said, “I wasn’t looking at her. As soon as I finished, I killed her. That was that.” Any guilt at the time? “Absolutely none.”
Ni Nianke remembered an especially horrific incident that happened when he was a scared ten-year-old boy living in Niyong village, Guhuang province in China. Japanese soldiers had spent the day ransacking his village. That evening he hid in fear with his mother. In the distance he heard a local boy, Li Taidong, scream for a half hour and then stop. The German shepherd dogs accompanying the Japanese soldiers had barked as Li screamed and they continued to bark for thirty more minutes after his cries ceased. The next day, Ni and his mother ventured out to see what had happened and encountered a gruesome sight: Li’s nearly fleshless skeleton hung from a tree. “Strips of meat that had clearly been torn at by dogs lay on the ground below.” It was obvious that “Li had been strung up naked and that the soldiers had sliced off his flesh to feed to the dogs.”
Japanese army soldier Genzo Honma remembered that the Chinese devils were useful for all sorts of experiments: “To test the power of hand grenades, the officers would go and grab a nearby man and thrust one against his stomach, after pulling the pin. As the man writhed in protest, the grenade would fall to the ground and explode—just seven seconds after the pin was pulled. The man’s legs would scatter like clouds and disappear like mist; only his torso remained on the ground.”
“I personally severed more than forty heads,” Shintaro Uno remembered. “Today, I no longer remember each of them well. It might sound extreme, but I can almost say that if more than two weeks went by without my taking a head, I didn’t feel right. Physically, I needed to be refreshed. I would go to the stockade and bring someone out, one who looked as if he wouldn’t live long. I’d do it on the riverbank, by the regimental headquarters, or by the side of the road. I’d order the one I planned to kill to dig a hole, then cut him down and cover him over.”
Back home, the press reported the exciting competition between Lieutenant “M” and Lieutenant “N” to see who would be the first to sever one hundred heads. On November 30, 1937, the newspaper Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun featured the headline:
CONTEST TO CUT DOWN A HUNDRED!
UP TO EIGHTY
The December 6 headline kept the home front abreast of the contest:
IT’S 89-78 IN THE “CONTEST TO CUT DOWN A HUNDRED”
A CLOSE RACE, HOW HEROIC!
And finally, on December 13:
CONTEST TO CUT DOWN A HUNDRED GOES OVER THE TOP, M-106, N-105
PAIR PLANS TO EXTEND CONTEST
The Japanese soldiers who saw no value in Chinese lives were aware that their officers placed little value on theirs. The soldiers in the field were constantly reminded that they were only worthless issen gorin. Yoshio Nakamura winced as he recalled brutal marches lugging a heavy machine gun across China. “If we were lax in our care, the devil sergeant would slap our faces and scold us, saying, ‘I can replace you draftees with a single red card, but I can’t immediately replace a light machine gun. It’s a valuable weapon.’”
The resources dedicated to medical care of wounded soldiers are an excellent measure of a country’s attitude toward its boys in the field. Evacuation of the wounded is always a burden for any military. The Spirit Warriors simplified the problem. “We evacuated only the ones able to walk,” Tominaga said, “and only as many as we could. The rest of the injured were expected to kill themselves.”
The Spirit Warriors did show some concern about their soldiers raping Chinese women. Not out of any concern for the women-beasts, but because rape might spread disease among the troops. An army medical report warned that “a soldier suffering from vene
real disease required an average of 86 days’ hospitalization; thus the spread of such a disease would weaken the strength of the Army considerably.” Eventually, to reduce the incidence of happenstance rapes with the potential for spreading disease, the Spirit Warriors devised a system of organized and regulated mass rape. The euphemism for the victims of this crime was jugun ianfu, or “military comfort women.” These comfort women were “recruited” to serve in military “comfort stations.” Health officials monitored these comfort stations so the soldiers could express their “natural desires” in a relatively safe manner.
“Recruitment” of comfort women meant kidnapping Korean and Chinese girls. Virgins twelve to fifteen years old were best, since they would be disease free. These girls were simply plucked off streets and playgrounds and shipped by train, truck, or ship to where they were forced to render their service. The new girls, completely unaware of what was in store for them, would be ushered into a room and one by one raped as the others shrieked and cowered. High-ranking officers got the first chance. Once the officers were satisfied, the dazed girls were confined to the nearby comfort station.
Wherever troops were stationed, they were raping young sex slaves. The army estimated that “20,000 comfort women were required for every 700,000 Japanese soldiers, or 1 woman for every 35 soldiers.” Each young sex slave had to “service” at least forty and up to seventy soldiers a day. The girls got one day off a month—the day the doctors examined them for disease. Army documents referred to the terrified high school-age girls as “military supplies.” Perhaps 200,000 girls were dragged into this nightmare sex-slavery gulag; less than 10 percent survived.
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